TRIPPI, KERRY, AND SO ON

Looking at the full text of the GQ piece on Trippi that spawned the robo-call allegation, there's greater context to the sense that Trippi knee-jerk fingered Kerry on the issue...

Almost on cue, his little dog, Kasey—an overly caffeinated terrier who appears on the Dean Web site as the "director of canine outreach"—comes scampering into his office. "Kasey!" says Joe. "Sit!" He rises from his desk and stands menacingly over the dog. "Would you rather work for John Kerry or be dead?" The dog whimpers. "WOULD YOU RATHER WORK FOR JOHN KERRY OR BE DEAD?" Kasey rolls over and acts dead.

"Good girl! Good girl!"

And,

"We're about to do something really fucking dumb," he recalls telling the various groups he's done his presentation for, if "we" don't rally around Dean. "All because of what? 'Cause John Kerry keeps telling you we're not electable? What the fuck makes him electable? We're kickin' his ass! Last time I checked, the only way you're electable is if you're the nominee."

Trippi also loved to tell his audiences, "I don't care if you run out of the room right now and tell John Kerry" everything he's shared. "Because there's not a damn thing he can do about it."

Oh, and,

Trippi sits in the back of the bus from the airport to the first event in Austin, on a Pepsi-induced high. For the entire ride, he and his partners—McMahon and Mark Squier—joke about how they could "whack" John Kerry in the next debate, which was going to be sponsored by Latinos.

"Maybe we should attack Kerry in Spanish!" Joe suggests. "He won't know what we said!"

"No," says McMahon, "we should ask Kerry a question in Spanish."

They ponder the ways Kerry could "nuke us."

"It could be a race between us and the ketchup money," says Joe. "But it won't be a race between us and Kerry."

Though I did find this amusing:

More yuks ensue over the fact that John Kerry is also in Texas tonight and "only twenty people" showed up for his Texas Meet-n-Greet. "But if those twenty people e-mail one hundred people.," says Karl, cribbing the Dean stump speech. Dean cracks up, then decides to go to bed. "See you in five hours," he says, retreating to his room.

"Let's go find a bar," says Joe.

We don't know if Kerry did this, as Trippi would blame Kerry for the leaves falling off the trees in October. (though I do like Joe Trippi, because of him and Dean, we now have a whole stable of candidates who learned to not be afraid to vigorously attack Dubya, or at least they did more quickly)

What we do know, however, is that somebody did do this. It's the sort of nonsense that's usually reserved for Republicans in general elections (you know, the "clear all unpaid parking tickets and bills" stuff, and the "be sure to go vote on wednesday!" stuff). I'd like to know who was resonsible. Going after one candidate (Kerry) sans substantial evidence, as Trippi (and to a lesser extent, Kos) did, is not the way to go, but to be genuinely concerned about this isn't tantamount to fratricide.

I do take issue with one tidbit of Ezra's analysis of the issue:

There are also plausible theories implicating Lieberman, Edwards, Bush and even Dean himself in this.

So... Dean spends $10 million, or maybe more, in Iowa over about two years, and then sabotages himself? Or some orange-hatted, highly-motivated (if poorly trained, hehe) Dean underling suddenly gets all nihilistic or anarchistic and pulls funny stuff with the database, which wasn't working anyway? If you're wearing an orange hat and you came from a distant part of the country to a plains state with continuous below-freezing temperatures, then you're a true believer.

Also, wasn't it in Lieberman's interest to have a wide margin between Dean and Clark/Edwards in New Hampshire, and thus a weakened Clark campaign?

Alright, I have some rather serious duties to attend to in the next 36 hours, so no posts probably until tomorrow night, possibly sunday.